Trust and Visuality – Everyday Digital Practices

Trust and Visuality: Everyday digital practices (TRAVIS) is a research project that will look at how people experience, build and express trust in news and social media images related to wellbeing and health.

We chose this focus for three reasons: First, humans experience visual information as more trustworthy than other communicative modes. Second, while trust continues to be crucial for social life, it is significantly complicated by our increasing reliance on online communication, where we have to infer our communication partners and their intentions from their on-screen representations and algorithmic manipulation. And finally, the pandemic showed us that visual digital representations related to our individual (step counts, recovery selfies) and collective (visualisations of infection rates) experiences of health are increasingly central to our lives. This makes every day, visual social media communication of health news and personal health content the perfect case study to understand trust.

Thus, TRAVIS investigates how and why people trust some visuals over others, and how content-creators and professionals create trustworthiness with and through digital visual content. Our research is undertaken in four different cultural contexts – Austria, Estonia, Finland and the UK – allowing us to combine perspectives from Nordic, Eastern-European/Post-Soviet, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultures, each with their own traditions and norms of trust as well as significant differences in how much institutions are trusted.

CONSORTIUM:

Tallinn University, Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Estonia
University of Salzburg, Department of Communication, Austria
Tampere University, Communication Sciences Unit, Finland
University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, United Kingdom

Funding: Project TRAVIS is supported by the Estonian Research Council – https://etag.ee/en/, Academy of Finland: https://www.aka.fi/en/, Austrian Science Fund, FWF – https://www.fwf.ac.at/de/, Economic and Social Research Council https://www.ukri.org/councils/esrc/ under CHANSE ERA-NET Co-fund programme, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under Grant Agreement no 101004509

Duration: 2022–2025

Tampere University

Asko Lehmuskallio

Professor (Visual Studies)
PI
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
Tampere University
asko.lehmuskallio@tuni.fi

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About me

Asko Lehmuskallio serves as Professor of Visual Studies at Tampere University and until May 2023 as Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He is co-founder and -director of the Visual Studies Lab.

In his research, Lehmuskallio focuses particularly on the intersection between visual studies and media studies, with a special interest in media anthropology and digital cultures. He leads two research projects, one on Banal Surveillance, funded by the Academy of Finland, another one on Image/Knowledge, funded by C.V. Åkerlund Media Foundation, and is additionally involved in the Speculative Camera project. During the autumn 2022, he will start as PI in two consortium projects, one on Visions of the City (Academy of Finland) with PL Markus Laine, and another on Trust and Visuality (EU CHANSE) with PL Katrin Tiidenberg (Tallinn) and PI’s Maria Schreiber (Salzburg) and Gillian Rose (Oxford).

Lehmuskallio studied cultural anthropology at Philipps-Universität Marburg, and image science (Bildwissenschaft) at the Dept. of Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He received his PhD (YTT) at the School of Communication, Media and Theatre in Tampere, and was awarded in 2016 the Title of Docent in Visual Studies. After his PhD, Lehmuskallio has held several fellowships abroad, including as Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, US, at the Sussex Humanities Lab, UK, and as Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Among his publications are the co-edited works Digital Photography and Everyday Life (2016, Routledge) and Mobile Digital Practices (2017, Digital Culture & Society) and the Finnish-language Entanglements between Bodies and Documents: A History of the Finnish Passport (2020, Finnish Museum of Photography), co-authored with Paula Haara. In addition, he has published in a variety of journals and edited books, including in Visual Communication, International Journal of Communication, IEEE Pervasive Computing and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.

Lehmuskallio has also co-curated two well-received exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, #snapshot (2014-15) and Documenting the body: A history of the Finnish Passport (2020).

ORCID ID 0000-0002-8271-9830, Twitter handle @verlook

Jenni Niemelä-Nyrhinen

Postdoctoral Researcher
Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication – COMET
Tampere University
jenni.niemela-nyrhinen@tuni.fi

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Jenni Niemelä-Nyrhinen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Research Centre COMET located at the Communication Sciences Unit at Tampere University in Finland. Her research interests include philosophy of photography, social uses of photography, visual journalism, and politics of aesthetics. In past few years she has written articles on such issues as phatic photographic communication, photography as play, epistemologies of the photographic image and aesthetic practices in the climate crisis.

ORCID 0000-0001-5025-1578

Tobias Schmid

Researcher
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
Tampere University
tobias.schmid@tuni.fi

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Tobias Schmid is a researcher at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University. He holds a Masters degree in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Tobias has two years of project based work experience in political consulting with stations at polisphere, Bernstein Group and PRLX. He is part of the Image/Knowledge research project led by Asko Lehmuskallio. His research focusses on the visual transformation of health on platform services and mobile devices.

Tallinn University

Katrin Tiidenberg

Professor
Baltic Film, Media and Arts School
Tallinn University

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Katrin Tiidenberg is Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University, Estonia. She is the author of multiple books on social media, digital visual cultures and digital research methods, including, most recently “Tumblr” (2021, co-authored by Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin) and “Sex and Social Media” (2020, co-authored by Emily van der Nagel), “Selfies, why we love (and hate) them.” As well as the co-editor of award-winning “Making sense of the Datafied World: a Methodological Guide” (2020, in Estonian, co-edited with Anu Masso and Andra Siibak) and “Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity” (2020, co-edited with Annette Markham). She is currently wrapping up a research project on platformization of sexuality and on the role of the internet in young people’s political participation and starting a project one on visual digital trust (TRAVIS). Her research interests span social media, digital cultures, networked visuality, internet governance and self-care. More info at: https://katrin-tiidenberg.com/

University of Salzburg

Maria Schreiber

Post-Doc Researcher
Department of Communications
University of Salzburg

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Maria Schreiber is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Her work focuses on visual and digital media cultures and qualitative methods. Previously, she worked at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, investigating ‘Visual Biographies in a networked lifeworld’. Maria was a visiting researcher at the University of Potsdam’s center on ‘Visuality and Making Visible’ and at the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT in Melbourne. She held a scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Science as part of the DOC-team ‘Pictorial Practices’. She is part of the interdisciplinary DFG-network ‘Transformative Visuality’ (https://bild-netzwerk.net/ ).
Find out more here: https://www.plus.ac.at/kommunikationswissenschaft/fachbereich/mitarbeiterinnen-2/post-doc/schreiber-maria/, Twitter, academia.edu

Andrea Schaffař

Post-Doc Researcher
Department of Communications
University of Salzburg

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Andrea Schaffař works as a Post-Doc Researcher: She is part of the Austrian TRAVIS team at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg. Her second work affiliation is with the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the department for Cross-Disciplinary Strategies. Her work focuses on the use of qualitative methods and methodologies at the intersections of different disciplines. Complimenting this her research and teaching areas include media studies and media pedagogy, urban studies and housing, and social dynamics. She published recently ‘Digital dynamics and change’ in GIO, about Grounded Theory in Analyzing Group Interactions and is currently working on a book chapter for ‘Wohnen erforschen’ (Researching housing) about group discussions and how research findings can be used within design processes of housing projects. Additionally, she works as a trainer and consultant in the field of organizational development and group dynamics. Find out more: Mastodon https://sciences.social/@aschaffar, Twitter SocioKommunik, Google Scholar Andrea Schaffař

Marius Liedtke

Doctoral Candidate
Department of Communications
University of Salzburg

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Marius Liedtke is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communications at the University of Salzburg. He holds a Masters degree in Socio-Cultural Studies from European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He is co-author of the study “Learning from Influencers: YouTube & Co. as playgrounds for left-wing politics and educational work” (2019, in German) and part of the research project “STICK & FLOW: A Critical Framework for investigating bot engagement on social media”. Marius research interests include digital cultures, political activism and (audio-)visual communication. Find out more: Research Gate, Twitter

University of Oxford

Gillian Rose

Professor
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford

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Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences; she has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Karlstad. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2022). Edited collections include Women Writing Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (with Alison Blunt, Guilford, 1994), Visuality/Materiality (with Divya Tolia-Kelly, Ashgate, 2012) and most recently, Seeing the City Digitally, available open access from Amsterdam University Press here. She has also written many papers on images, spatialities, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture and how cities are seen and experienced. Find out more about her work here https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.html and follow her on Twitter @ProfGillian. She is also trying to restart her blog here.

Josie Hamper

Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of Oxford

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Josie Hamper is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the embodied experiences, knowledge and practices that emerge at the intersection between new technology, health and medicine. Her previous work, which was funded by the ESRC and Wellcome Trust, has explored how digital visualisations (including fertility monitoring data and prenatal imagery) travel through people’s social worlds. She has published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Social Science & Medicine and Culture, Health & Sexuality, among other journals.